Solutions to technical problems

Upgrading Qnap TS109 from Jessie to Stretch

I have an old Qnap TS109 NAS that has been running Debian since long. I have previously written about my upgrade to Wheezy and Jessie.

The upgrade to Strech is the same procedure, and it was fine in the end, but…

In a very late phase of the upgrade I got:

update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-5-marvell
flash-kernel: installing version 4.9.0-5-marvell
The initial ramdisk is too large. This is often due to the unnecessary inclusion
of all kernel modules in the image. To fix this set MODULES=dep in one or both
/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/driver-policy (if it exists) and
/etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf and then run 'update-initramfs -u -k 4.9.0-5-marvell'
Not enough space for initrd in MTD 'RootFS1' (need 4210887 but is actually 4194304).

Well, the MODULES=dep thing does not help, but there is a another fix. You can compress your initramfs image. The procedure is described in the end of troubleshooting TS109.

The very short procedure is (I recommend you read the real article above):